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The Passes, Part 2: Glen Pass to Kearsarge Lakeshttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-passes-part-2-glen-pass-to-kearsarge-lakes/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-passes-part-2-glen-pass-to-kearsarge-lakes/#commentsSun, 02 Oct 2016 21:40:33 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=598Continue reading The Passes, Part 2: Glen Pass to Kearsarge Lakes]]>The next night, we sat on a granite spit jutting into the central and largest of the Kearsarge Lakes watching the sun disappear over the horizon’s watery ledge. As the day cooled, the golden trout began to jump, making a plipping sound each time one broke the surface in a lunge for a gnat or mosquito. They were medium-sized fish, six inches long, with yellow bellies, green coppery backs, and a red stripe bisecting their dorsal and ventral sides. We watched them twinkle all around us, their sides flashing in the low sun. Where shadows interrupted the sun’s quicksilvering, we watched their forms glide into the deep. They were all around us and almost constant: piscine fireworks, and as fun to watch.

To the south, huge rock faces of the Kearsarge Pinnacles loomed, and we passed time trying to describe faces or other formations in the towering piles and sheer walls. The kids had wanted to follow the trail around to the south side of the lake earlier that day, but the vast sweeps of gravel laced with snow and sharp scree spilling directly into the lake looked like a great way to slide into a hypothermic drowning incident. I suspected Mary Austin was describing exactly this cliff face when she wrote, “I remember one night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under a slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the heavy detonation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying a very human woe.”

We were more likely to lose a child due to overconfidence on unsteady ground than to an epochal shearing of rock from the cliffs high above us, so The Husband and I nixed their plan, encouraging them instead to join us as we swam in a sheltered cove near our site, one with a shallow bottom and flowering banks. We kicked up mud and slow streamers of algae as we plunged ourselves into the icy water, rinsing off the day’s sweat and dirt.

We had made it! Only one more pass to cross over before we could return to the greasemobile, have a diner lunch, and voyage through the furnace air of the Owens Valley to our home in the foothills of the San Gabriels. Our sons were giddy. Son the Younger especially enjoyed my ventriloquization of an ant heroically trying to carry a grain of rice we’d dropped on the rock at supper and hoping not to have to share it with his archrival, Fred the ant. He made me promise to write down the whole story in the trip log. He kept watch over the sky, reporting as its tones changed from the bright copper to tangerine. We watched the lake surface and sky subside into a holy blue. Previous nights, tired and vexed by insects, we’d gone to bed well before dark, but tonight we didn’t care. We watched campers across the lake plunge into the lake from a boulder, sending a clamor across the entire basin. As we were finally getting ready to zip ourselves into our bags, we watched their flashlight bobble on the promontory where they were camped.

This was a far cry from the fret in which we’d woken and begun the day, with Son the Younger harping on crossing both passes before noon and bursting into tears when his altitude- and exercise-swollen feet wouldn’t slide into his damp tennis shoes. His exhaustion and anxiety expressed themselves as free-floating anger which he took out indirectly on us – the tormentors who’d planned this whole affair – in bursts of stridency (not tantrums: he kept walking, just ranted his anxiety). I worked with him on his breathing, instructing him to inhale to the count of four, hold it for as long, and exhale slowly. I tried it myself and found that it actually helped. It’s harder to be worked up when your body’s breathing is slow and regular. The harder part is actually letting go of the strange pleasures of being worked up.

Except for his anxiety, the beginning of the hike went well. We were steeled and our loins girded, since this time we knew in considerable detail what we were up against, having hiked down it less than 24 hours earlier. We ascended from the lake through the alpine meadows with alacrity; even the first snow chute turned out to be a quick, aerobic ascent. It wasn’t till we reached the first major obstacle – the long snow slide – that we had any real problems.

We decided to pick our way up the partial trail to the side rather than trekking alongside the chute through the snow. We were hoping to avoid a breakdown on the potentially hypothermia-inducing snowsheet, but instead, we got our breakdown on the rocky face of the mountain’s first serious foothill, when Son the Younger hit his shin. He’d been hiking hard and fast, with an angry edge, and when he stumbled, his intensity boiled over.

Powering up the first slide

I sat with him, coaching him on his breathing. Observing Son the Younger over the years has provided me with a unique kind of therapy: he’s inherited a lot of my personality, complicated aspects of it I don’t think he’s been able to observe directly, or at least not consciously, in his first eight years. Things that have to do with my attitude towards work, time, and self-worth. Seeing him, for example, develop an arcane system whereby he reads fifteen or twenty books at a time has helped me to find a certain amount of compassion for myself; I’d always thought my mild OCD and perfectionism were character failings and somehow my fault. When I saw Son the Younger trying to control the world around him with his methodicity, or fight back tears at the slightest, most offhand expression of disapproval from an authority figure, I could see that he couldn’t help acting this way. In him, I could also see in a way I couldn’t see in myself that these behaviors were the results of certain strengths he had: self-discipline, emotional perspicacity, a drive and ability to do things well.

I’d been encouraging him on this hike to take care of himself, to realize that he wasn’t performing for anyone and that he needed to hike at a pace that would let him keep hiking for several days. I was trying to practice this mentality myself, having realized within the last few years that at some level I was always trying to hike fast and hard to fit in with that erstwhile band of Lost Boys with whom The Husband had once hiked. So as we sat, I tried to help Son the Younger take care of himself: to breathe, to let go of the unreasonable expectation that we’d be able to hike out before dark, to try to appreciate how special it was that we got to be in this place: as many hikers had pointed out, not many eight-year-olds get their asses over Glen Pass.

I understood the power of his unreasonable expectation: it was an aggressive goal, one whereby he could communicate not only his frustration with us for pushing him on this long hike, but his undeniable and ruthless competence, or his will to develop this competence. Son the Younger plays soccer and when a game is not going his way he tends to flop. I get this; he’s a talented player and there’s nothing more frustrating to a talented person than having the expression of that talent get tangled up and thwarted. During games, I often encourage him to tap into a kind of ruthless mastery, to show the other team what he thinks of their rough play by nailing goal after goal, which sometimes he can pull off. On the side of the mountain, though, I saw freshly that the vicious exercise of ruthless competence is a tool that must be used carefully, as it redounds upon one in exhausting, disheartening, and ultimately disorienting ways – disorienting because my addiction to mastery makes it hard to follow paths on which I think I might fail or otherwise fuck up, even if those are the paths that I really want to follow. You have to be able to turn on will-to-power when you need it and not let it take over.

I talked to him about his desire to hike out, his litany of panic about not getting over Glen, not getting over Kearsarge, not getting to Golden Donut, the carrot he’d hung for himself across those passes. I call that kind of piling-on of worry catastrophizing, and it’s another bad habit I’m surprised to see emerge fully formed in him, like a handwringing Athena from Zeus’s clammy brow. When I feel the sensation of worry, I told him, sometimes I search around in my consciousness for what might be producing it, and I can usually drum up a pretty good list. Then I let them all bounce around in the echo chamber. I think I feel like I need to justify the intensity of the physical sensation of worry. Maybe I like worry, maybe I’m a little addicted to the helplessness it authorizes. Like the ruthless competence thing, it gives me ways to stay off the high rocky paths, the ones that might involve failing at exactly the things I care about the most. When I do that, I sometimes try to look at the worry realistically, I told him. See if it’s actually likely to happen. Think about what might happen if it does come to pass and whether or not that’s actually bad. What happens if we don’t get over Kearsarge today? It means we’ll have to cross it tomorrow. We’ll have to get donuts tomorrow instead of today. Is that really that bad? What happens if we take an extra day in the backcountry? You’ll miss a day of camp. Is that worth panicking over?

Even better, I went on, try to observe the feeling of worry instead of the worry itself. Notice that it doesn’t last forever, sometimes because it just stops, and sometimes because events eliminate the uncertainty you were worrying over in the first place. The feeling passes. Focus on the feeling, where the worry makes your body feel something. See how long it lasts.

Snow Hazard Take Two

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After some of this talk, Son the Younger decided hiking was better than listening to his mom. The rest of the climb turned out to be easier than the descent, especially the dread traverse, which we crossed without incident. We handed out Jolly Ranchers at the top, exchanging stories with two women from Ventura County and a through-hiker who’d made incredible time by not taking any zeros. We rested there at the top of the world, feeling the tired solidarity of our bones with the boulders.

Heading down from Glen Pass, south side

The final obstacle was a steep downward scramble past three snow-over switchbacks. I had a moment of panic, feeling my (unlatched) pack sway out from the mountainside as I backed down, but The Husband spotted me, and before I knew it, the three of them had hiked out of sight. I walked slowly, breathing, enjoying the sepulchral lakes and the wildflowers bursting from the rocks.

Ice lake; sons on boulder

I caught up with the boys at the biggest lake, its waters sealed in by a sheet of ice already grown gappier than it had been the day before. The boys threw rocks onto it, some of which slid and others of which splashed into the cloudy turquoise. We descended terrace by terrace, snaking our way between pools still gathering volume from the patches of snow basking on the surrounding boulder fields, a season-long osmotic filtration. Eventually the broad curve of Charlotte Lake came into view, and we descended out of the heights onto the broad plateau that sloped down to Vidette Meadows. We lunched at a trail crossing, toasting tortillas and cheese on the Whisperlite.

From there it was a steady and uneventful hike down another set of switchbacks through the piñon and juniper to Bubbs Creek, which we followed back past Bullfrog Lake, enjoying the tall purple wild onion blossoms, and through the rocky waste at the foot of the Kearsarge Pinnacles back to the Kearsarge Lakes.

We trekked along the shore, crossing barefoot through a neck of water that connected two of them. There we found the perfect spot – promontory, boulder spit, swimming cove, fast-moving stream. And we had the whole evening to enjoy it.

Sunset #yesfilter

We waited till the sky was dark before retiring to our tent. Anxiety dreams woke me halfway through the night. I climbed out of the tent in the middle of the night. Moonlight was pouring into the basin through the notch between University Peak and Kearsarge Pass, throwing the cliff faces into new patterns of relief and floodlighting the terrain we had just watched recede into darkness. I looked up to the stars in the light-washed sky. The fish had gone to sleep or turned to submarine matters. Before long, a mosquito joined me. I thought better of staying out in the strange enchanted basin and so unzipped the tent and climbed into its familiar warmth.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-passes-part-2-glen-pass-to-kearsarge-lakes/feed/1day-4-fred-the-antslkundeday-4-fred-the-ant-iiday-4-climbing-the-slideday-4-snow-hazard-ivday-4-descending-glenday-4-flower-close-upday-4-ice-lakeday-4-potato-streamday-4-sunsetThe Passes: Day 3https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-passes-day-3/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-passes-day-3/#respondSun, 18 Sep 2016 23:11:03 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=510Continue reading The Passes: Day 3]]>This was part of a five-day hike from Onion Valley (a few miles east of Independence, CA), over Kearsarge Pass to the Pacific Crest Trail/John Muit Trail, which we took north over Glen Pass to the Rae Lakes. We spent day 1 packing, driving to Onion Valley, and acclimating to the high altitude (Onion Valley is over 9000 feet), day 2 hiking over Kearsarge to a small lake just west of Bullfrog Lake, day 3 hiking over Glen Pass to the Rae Lakes, day 4 returning to Kearsarge Lakes, and day 5 hiking out over Kearsarge Pass. My account focuses on days 3 and 4 of the hike. This is part 1.Our path: Onion Valley, over Kearsarge, over Glen, to the Rae Lakes Ranger Station and back again

I stepped on a mound loose dirt and pebbles, making way for a line of hikers coming up the tail. I tried to make sure Son the Elder and Son the Younger had secure footing. The group appeared to be two fathers, each with two sons; they had the clean-cut, can-do look of Boy Scouts. As they strained up the trail, I could see that stricken, glazed expression that emerges somewhere halfway up an arduous ascent at the moment when you’re sure the pass will be a minute or so away but then you realize you have at least another mile of hard climbing. This expression worried me for what it implied about the climb they had just done, which we were about to do in reverse.

We had reached Glen Pass – 11926 feet – after a long morning of climbing through otherworldy, boulder- and ice-crammed lake basins, past rocks sprouting bunches of purple blossoms, and patches of snow faintly red with a peculiar algae. We were surprised by a couple of snow traverses: snowed-over sections of trail into which earlier and better-equipped hikers had etched shelves of footprints. The traverses on the way up – the south side of Glen Pass – were mostly short, maybe twenty or thirty feet. Only one of them felt dangerous, involving an off-trail scramble past two switchbacks. I breathed a sigh of relief when I, my eight-year-old (who, as my husband likes to point out, has only recently outgrown the small-child habit of falling down for no reason, even on a level sidewalk), and my ten-year-old stepped back on to the well-constructed, beautiful trail and we could see the knife’s edge of Glen Pass only a few steps away.

Made it!

My relief was short-lived. As we doled out the celebratory Jolly Ranchers and tried to find a comfortable seat amongst the broken rocks and four or five through-hikers also taking a breather, the realities of the descent before us dawned on me: first of all, the longest and most vertiginous snow traverse I’d ever seen in twenty years of high-country hiking. Half a football field in length, the field of crystalline, sparkling snow stretched down the bare mountainside, ending at a sickening angle in an endless stretch of grey-green rocks that glinted in the cold sun. Second, how could we possibly get down that far? The mountain fell away to an ice-lake plateau a thousand feet below and thereafter another heart-stopping thousand feet to the grassy basin which had collected two aquamarine lakes from aeons of mountaintop snowmelt. Friends had sung praises of the Rae Lakes to us, touting them as the crown jewels not just of the John Muir Trail (which mostly doubles the Pacific Crest Trail in the High Sierras) but of the whole 2650 mile stretch of the PCT, and we had gone dreamy over the description of the high pure lakes. Now we could see them – but how could we possibly get to them without at least one of our children perishing in the process? I had read in the guidebooks that I should expect snow in the high passes until July, but five years of drought in Los Angeles, not to mention a three-day, triple-digit heat wave in Pasadena immediately preceding our departure, had lulled me into expecting that this year would see early melting. Standing there at 12,000 feet, miles of mountain landscape before, behind and most emphatically below me, I couldn’t imagine turning around, but I was not prepared for this descent. I didn’t have the gear or the skills for snow, and yet now, unless I wanted to turn tail and head back to Kearsarge Pass and out to Onion Valley and Independence, I was about to take my two children through a major snow hazard for which they were completely unprepared.

One serious m-f’in snow hazard

We sat on the crest of the high Sierras, feeling the wind and sun pour over us, and watched somberly as one, and then another through-hiker – grimy, bearded, and pinwheel-eyed with weeks of fifteen-mile days behind him – grasped his poles and marched out into the bright snow, cool as Shackleton. The figure of a hiker on the white ground threw the path into relief. For at least the first section, it rested at the bottom of a trough that would stop any but the most spasmodic and unlucky fall. The second half was less protected. “You’re supposed to unstrap your pack on a traverse, right?” Having answered the same question several times on the way up, my husband ignored me. We settled on an order – Son the younger, me, Son the Elder, husband – and set out. I unbuckled my pack, feeling the swing of its weight.

We passed through the tunneled-in section easily. I grasped the top of Son the Younger’s backpack lightly and reminded him to test each footstep. Besides tumbling down a traverse, one can step through a thin crust into a hollow and twist an ankle or slam a shin. Halfway through, the protective buffer flattened, and I stole a glance down the snow sheet, eyeing the patient rocks made spectacular by the mountain’s cathedral sweep. I chose to fix my eyes on the path ahead of me from then on. If I could make each step – and why on earth shouldn’t I be able to? – I could cross the snow. I told Son the Younger the same.

Completing the snow hazard

As we closed in on the final third, Son the Elder began to panic. I could hear my husband’s voice, deliberately calm, cajoling him to take the last few steps. And all of a sudden, we were on the wet rocks on the far side of the snow. We caught our breath and turned to the next task: a precipitous descent over a path blocked periodically by drifts mountain snow, shrunken by a month or so of warming into piles of granular ice. The going was delicate, but not impossible. On one steep scramble, I lost my footing several times but regained it easily, and I watched the kids do the same. It was about then we passed the two dads and their sons. Up to that point, I had been rationalizing our continued descent by figuring the worst was behind us. When one boy stopped, slipped the crampons off his boots, and handed them to Braird without a word, I wasn’t so sure. “At least you’ll be going down when you get to the slide,” one of the fathers said. I smiled and nodded like I knew what he was talking about.

At a bend we paused to survey our progress, and we caught sight of what he meant: a long trough through the snow piled at the foot of the peak, a slide that represented a significant shortcut past a section of loose, improvised trail. It was a couple hundred feet long and involved a hundred feet of elevation loss. A couple who had passed us on the way up to Glen had just reached it, and we watched their descent. The man launched himself, zigzagging around a patch of rocks about halfway down the slope. The woman screamed as she shot past the rocks. When she reached the bottom she hopped up, replaying the experience for her boyfriend’s benefit. We heard the excitement in her voice but no words except one sentence: her reaction to her near-confrontation with the patch of rocks, which was, “And I was like, ‘Fuuuuck!’”

View to Kearsage Pass from the Mary Hunter Austin House in Independence

Mary Austin, who explored the Kearsarge section of the high Sierras in the early 1900’s, describes the high slopes of these passes as the “ice-worn, stony hollows where the bighorns cradle their young. These are above the wolf’s quest and the eagle’s wont, and though the heather beds are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here only the stars go by.” We were up there, thrust into the purview of the stars, and trying to pick our way down from the pile with our little family, lightly furred mammals not unlike Austin’s one other four-footed denizen of the alpine regions, “some small, brown creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks.” We were much bigger than mountain rats, and much clumsier than bighorn. We were saddled with huge packs bearing four days of food and clothes.

The Husband and I looked at each other: take the slide or pick our way down the poor trail? Both looked potentially deadly, but the slide had the advantage of being faster. When we got to the bend that opened out onto the snow, we considered. It was a wide, tempting path down to the plateau, not unlike a sledding hill, only much longer, steeper, and there were no sleds. We worked through different configurations – just The Husband would slide while the kids and I picked our way down? He’d go first and then we’d try? Two at a time? Finally, we opted to stick together: a four-person caterpillar, dad in front, mom in back, kids protected in the middle.

We plunked down into the snow, and The Husband tested it for a few feet; by leaning back, he could use his pack as a brake. We made our way down in peristaltic motions, with him shoving forward and then stopping just as the momentum reached me at the back of the line. I shouted for him to go faster, but then everyone was shouting. Snow piled between our legs as we plowed down, and I began to row Son the Younger and myself forward using bare hands against the drifts of granulated ice. I began to get cold and had the sensation that my pants had torn clean away. My fingerpads grew numb. We slid to a clumsy stop where the slope flattened, clambered out of the icy drift and onto a waste of angular boulders. I jumped up and down and put my fingers in my armpits and then my mouth to warm them. I couldn’t feel the tips of the last three fingers on my left hand. I was cold, robbed of my core heat by prolonged contact with the snow.

The Big SlideThe Little Slide

Everyone else was fine, and after a rest, we set out over fields of boulders interspersed with patches of snow. At least they were flat, and Son the Elder relished putting on his snow spikes every time we came to a new patch of snow. We reached one last drop to a green plateau wet with streams and flowers – another slide, but this one a straight shot and only about as long and high as a traditional staircase or old-school playground slide. We shot down it. This time I used my elbows to row forward through the piled snow. When we got down, we crowded in the shade of a cypress and ate peanut butter and crackers. Son the Younger was despondent – cold, wet, tired, wanting to go home. I changed him into his one set of dry clothes and hung the wet ones on gnarled branches.

The lakes were in sight, perhaps 500 feet below us: a steady, winding, occasionally switchbacked descent. As we exited the meadow, two bucks lifted their heads from where they nibbled at the edelweiss. The sight of the lakes infused the boys with spirit, and they hiked out of my sight. Austin describes the lakes of the high Sierras as mysterious in their origin: “the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brow is guessed at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt.” I watched the placid jade eye draw closer as I passed down through the piñon and juniper. Before long, we were crossing the archipelago that divided the two lakes. I took off my shoes and put my feet into the cold water. For thirty minutes, I could do nothing but lie on my back and take my feet in and out of the freezing lakewater.

Rae Lakes Campsite

Our campsite looked out into the basin of the northern Rae Lake, a great green chalice of “sky water” (Thoreau’s phrase for Walden Pond) gathered from the towering mountain slopes that encircled us, dampness and shadow that had seeped down through the pines and scrub oak for ages out of memory and pooled there, inviting immersion, the slaking of all appetite in its numbing embrace. We found a cove and swam in the water, painfully cold to enter but so electrifying that once you stepped out you could hardly wait to plunge in again. Son the Elder, true to form, ducked under, porpoised about, and splashed everyone. Son the Younger went in up to his chest but hesitated to get his hair wet. We saw people on a flat rock on the far side of the lake and couldn’t tell if they were young or old, friends or lovers. We undressed and dried off in the thin high sunshine.

En route to the Rae Lakes ranger station

We had just enough time before dinner to hike to the ranger station on the east side of the north lake. I had always loved ranger cabins, from the first I’d seen in the backcountry of Glacier National Park somewhere over Stony Indian Pass. That one had been empty, but we’d visited a cabin used as a fire lookout in the Umatilla National Forest in southeastern Washington state one summer and had a pleasant visit with a grey-haired woman in a cabin with windows on every side and a huge map on a table smack in the center of the tiny enclosure, like an informative kitchen island. It was never clear how these structures had gotten built, how planed boards and nails and mallets and axes could have made it up these distant ridges.

I was hiking in Chacos, with a pebble stuck under the sole of my foot which I was too tired to shake out. My hips, legs, and feet ached. Son the Younger didn’t feel much better, complaining about the elective status of this hike. “I don’t want to see any cabin,” he told us again and again. The path ascended the lake’s steep east side, and we could look out over its entirety from between the sheltering pines. Late-afternoon sunshine filled the lake’s basin with a light that was practically sound, a ringing that thrilled the body’s core. We crossed streams rushing down creases in the mountain to feed the lakes’ mysterious stillness. Finally, we came to a red wood cabin on a promontory, and I was shaking hands with another pinwheel-eyed backcountry hiker.

Son the Younger availed himself of the Adirondack chair, and Son the Elder slipped into the underbrush to examine the devices the ranger had installed to aid water collection from the nearest stream. The Husband examined the trail box, finding an endless supply of Idahoan instant potatoes (which the kids hated) and even a Ziploc baggie of dehydrated mushrooms. We snagged those and mixed them into the olive oil/shelf-stable parmesan/garlic salt sauce I stirred into a pot full of spaghetti noodles back at our campsite. We ate wafer cookies and then, getting needled by mosquitos and being too tired to enjoy the sunset anyway, we zipped ourselves into the tent. It must have been 7:30 pm.

Son the Younger was worried, crying a little and wishing we were home, planning with a kind of desperate optimism how we might cross not only Glen but Kearsarge Pass the next day. He had his sights set on a stop at Golden Donut in La Canada on our way back into town, and we had reminded him they closed at 4 pm. I told him that it wouldn’t be good for any of us to cross two passes the next day. He cried more and said he just wanted to be home. I did too, honestly. I couldn’t get comfortable on the ground and I was too tired to think but not sleepy. So we lay there in our bags, wondering about getting back up the side of the mountain the next day as the sky grew pale and then dim. As shadows darkened the tent’s corners, we slept, the peaks high and silent over our gamy lair.

To Be Continued…

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-passes-day-3/feed/0Day 3 Rae Lake Sunsetslkundeimg_0945Day 3 Glen Pass West ViewDay 3 Glen Pass Snow HazardDay 3 Glen Pass Completing the Snow HazardView to Kearsarge from MAHDay 4 Big SlideDay 4 Slide looking downDay 3 Rae Lakes ArrivalDay 3 Rae Lake on way to Ranger STationReading Cloudshttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/speaking-substances-clouds/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/speaking-substances-clouds/#respondTue, 28 Jun 2016 17:05:49 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=403Continue reading Reading Clouds]]>Climbing into the San Gabriels on a Saturday in May 2016, we drove into clouds. From the outside, it seemed like the transition from sky to cloud would be crisp, but it turned out to be an ambiguous passage. Spray appeared on the windshield. Light fog gathered. What seemed opaque from the outside was in fact filmy.

In The Marvelous Clouds (2015), John Durham Peters makes a case for taking nonhuman matter as an object of media studies, a field that considers how modes of communication inflect and embody meaning. In arguing that entities like fire, water, stars, and clouds bear critical attention, Peters defines media broadly as “ensembles of natural element and human craft” (3). His ideas push against a line of reasoning articulated by Walter Benn Michaels and David Knapp in their 1982 essay “Against Theory,” in which the two men insist that in order for meaning to exist, a conscious entity must intend communication. Peters, alongside many New Materialist thinkers, wants to broaden the relay points of intention so that more loosely and widely inscribed constellations of intentionality can register as such. As to the meaning of meaning, he reasons, “If we mean mental content intentionally designed to say something to someone, then of course clouds and fire don’t communicate. But if we mean repositories of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence, then of course clouds and fire have meaning” (4). Atmospheric scientists are interested in reading clouds vis a vis climate change, specifically in trying to predict how the shifts in global temperature regimes will interact with cloud formation and vice versa. There is an extensive and rigorous science of clouds (including a bad-ass specialization called cloud microphysics, which reads clouds at the droplet level).

Low clouds near the surface of the earth have close to the same temperature as the earth’s surface, particularly at their bottoms. These clouds reflect radiative (solar) heat back into space, much like polar ice (aka the albedo effect). As a bonus, they emit the infrared they absorb from the earth’s surface from their tops at nearly the same rate an uncovered patch of earth would, since they’re close to the same temperature. More low clouds mean less warming. High clouds, by contrast, are cold and tend to be wispy, so they don’t have much albedo. They absorb upwelling infrared, but their coldness means that they don’t emit much from their tops. More high clouds mean more warming.

Changes in the global temperature regime will certainly have an effect on clouds, but this effect is devilishly difficult to predict or quantify. While the albedo effect of ice (which is solid, massive, and fairly stable) is relatively easy to predict, the size and transience of clouds make them a vexing unknown. There are thirty or so predominant climate models trying to predict the effect of rising levels of carbon in the atmosphere on the “global energy budget,” or how much energy exits the earth’s atmosphere versus how much enters it. The grids of these models are something like fifty kilometers on a side, but the dimensions of cumulus clouds are fractions of a kilometer. Shrinking the models’ grids by half (twenty-five kilometers to a side) would take ten times the computational time, and even such an increase in the resolution of the model would not be small enough to account for clouds. To shrink the model down to cloud-sized grids would mean that the computations could not run much faster than real time; in other words, to get results on how cloud patterns will have changed by 2030 might take decades to complete. The computational time would make it useless for extended climate prediction.

If the models are messy, so are the technics of reading. One tool is satellites, which can measure cloud surface area, temperatures, water, optical thickness, and aerosols. But in a way these aren’t really measurements. The satellites records the patterns of photon from the earth’s surface; in order to make that pattern mean something, scientists have to use mathematical models to elicit (or “retrieve”) data such as temperature readings. What the satellite does is somewhere between measurement and model. It’s reading in the humanistic sense of the word: using established and learned interpretive parameters to translate signals into meaning. Reading clouds – reading anything – is a complicated, subjective process heavily informed by an array of usually invisible strategies and assumptions.

When we arrived at Bandido, the clouds had receded. We didn’t notice them again until sunset, when light slanted between cloud strata, turning the clusters around the lower peaks carnival pink. Later that night while we were sitting around the campfire, I looked up to see thin silver clouds passing over the night sky. Instead of clouds, now the clear night was sheltering us and pressing us together around the fire. While Son the Elder led off round after round of ghost stories, Son the Younger yearned for sleep. Eventually we withdrew to the clearing where we’d set up camp. We could hear faint laughter and guitar music and see flaring campfires ranged around us like near stars.

When we woke in the morning, the clouds had settled in Bandido’s wide basin. They were thick but bright with diffused light. While the previous night the entire campground had seemed so near, girdled around us protectively like the ecliptic, now even our own group’s firepit lay out of sight, shrouded in skymatter, visible weather, aerosol water droplets made heavy by the night’s chill. We lay in our tents, enjoying the feeling of our backs on the earth while heaven kissed our faces.

By the time we got coffee going on the Coleman stove, the sun was slanting into the site, sending birds into a clamor and inspiring the dogs – Felix and Porkchop – to roll and tussle in Bandido’s gullies. We didn’t think about clouds again until we were driving home, descending from the cloud zone. Son the Younger, watching the wisps and plumes skate by us, wondered if you could measure how fast they moved.

Son the Elder; Felix swishing his tail on the left

Knowing definite things about clouds is pretty hard but continuing to think about them seems important to our ecological moment of danger. They remind us of how little we actually know, how the vast array of our technological apparatuses can proliferate uncertainties or can prompt us to think that we know what we don’t actually know. Scientific and humanistic inquiry try to increase the resolution with which we can see the lines between what we know and what we don’t know. They act as mechanisms to link our power to our abjectness, to all that limits that power. Thoreau writes of our ultimate vulnerability as embodied beings when he pictures a no-nonsense businessman reluctantly “committing himself to uncertainties” every night. This man is led by the trivial powers he exerts over people and daytime happenings to forget the power death always holds over him: “[The laboring man] has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance – which his growth requires – who has so often to use his knowledge?” (3). This is Thoreau’s reading of our lives under the regime of capitalistic consumption, the getting and spending that Wordsworth also bemoaned. Growth (and not in the economic sense) requires that we remember well our ignorance and the uncertainty to which we are always subject.

As I wrote this, I kept looking for ways that clouds tied into the narrative of my family’s weekend, ways they helped to mediate aspects of our human relatedness, but, true to form, they remained more or less in the background, “just” weather, slightly more noticeable because we were physically closer to it than usual. Clouds are like climate change: difficult to notice (though getting easier all the time) unless you look in particular ways, tricky to measure, certainly linked to human actions but nearly impossible to control. Clouds and climate remind us of the limitations on human will and knowledge and the ambiguity of boundaries that divide us from what appear to be outside us.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/speaking-substances-clouds/feed/0imagesslkundeimgres-3IMG_0237Plantshttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/plants/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/plants/#respondThu, 26 May 2016 17:59:59 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=346Continue reading Plants]]>Inspired by the Los Angeles Review of Book’s recent “Speaking Substances” series, I thought I would try the form as a collection of blog entries. The LARB pieces ask, “What if the best source of news about the planetary effects of environmental damage was the planet itself?” It explores four elemental media: Rocks, Bodies, Ice, and Oil. Mine will take up Plants.

“The Burners taught me that plants are people,” said the experimentalist, in reference to a long weekend in J-Tree devoted to the ingestion of manly quantities of psilocybin. “Matt would be over by some cactus or wildflower and introduce me. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’” As the philosopher, I held my tongue. Although I’m personally not a fan of taking chemical short-cuts to transcendent mental states, I had to agree: plants are people too.

We were in the mountains for a friend’s birthday at Bandido, north of La Canada just off the Angeles Crest highway, a site the birthday girl had described as “dreamy.” As we watched the sun set over a nearby ridge in a gauze of pink and later tracked the ghostly clouds rolling across the darkening skypatches between the tops of soaring Jeffery pines, I had to agree. We slept the best sleep I’ve ever had on a first night in the backcountry, cushioned by a luxe bed of needles and miscellaneous undergrowth.

In the morning, we hiked to the top of a nearby peak, Mt. Hillyer. I saw my friends from Baden-Powell, the rock-hugging clumps of silver leaves that would blush lapidary blossoms come August. Slender stalks with pyramidal heads of yellow blossoms – a species of mustard or shepherd’s purse – shivered and bobbed as we passed over nearby boulders. Low-spreading bushes thick with lavender blossoms seemed to exude moonlight – California lilac, aka soapbush. Spears of lupine raised their flags, pointing us off-trail.

When we reached the flat at the top of the peak, my son found the strangest plant yet, if plant it was: a waxen salmon flame emerging from the duff below a swaying ponderosa, a lone fungal forest-floor namaste, about as big as an artichoke. He knelt beside it, using my phone to take a selfie with this expressive, silent tongue.

The experimentalist and I stayed upmountain longer than the others, sharing a caffeinated Clif Bar, listening to the wind and receiving the subdued but amiable addresses of a field of nodding, purple-headed grasses. We both noticed their translation of the wind and in the moment at least found it preferable to anything we could say to each other. In fact, I pondered what it might be like to experience it as a kind of language, as an address to me as material and not as human.

Of course what I contemplated was impossible. If it’s language I can understand, it’s human. Maybe even the longing to receive such an address is suspect. For starters, in foregrounding the wind and grass I was already creating a frame that rendered some things invisible, taking them out of the imagined conversation: the phone with which I took the picture, the Prius we’d driven to the mountains, the chemically-engineered energy bar, the protected National Forest, the leisure time I had to enjoy it.

Nature is itself a cultural concept, and culture is of course a natural effect of human animals living together (Bruno Latour uses the term natureculture to express the inextricability of the two terms). Further, ideas of “nature” are historically specific, not timeless. The desire for a less mediated communion with the nonhuman that underwrites my desire to get into the mountains depends on the ways we currently conglomerate reality into the categories human, nonhuman, and nature. These conglomerations or blackboxes can make it hard to see the ways in which a long history of human practices (myths, crop cultivation, settler colonialism, advanced capitalism) condition all my contact with what seems, at least, to be natural, or nonhuman, or just not-me.

Maybe the best I can do is to become increasingly aware of the invisible (but not necessarily immaterial) conditions of my contact with all that environs me. And so, that afternoon, I tried to hear not just the plants – their undeniable invitation to enjoy the full sufficiency of embodiment and emplacement – but other media inflecting and transmitting what they had to say. In the moment, that meant calling on Thoreau to help me look at what there was to be seen. It meant trying to remember the leaves and berries of the manzanita so I could ask the birthday girl (also an acupuncturist) about their medicinal qualities. It meant identifying the Indian paintbrush – another old friend I’d first encountered in Glacier National Park during my initiation into backcountry trekking – reaching red plumes up to touch the day. It meant trying, at least in my imagination, to decompartmentalize the leisure time I spent in the backcountry from the rest of my life. It meant, and means, trying to stay engaged with the call (from me, or from the world?) to notice, to attend to what is before me, to touch the peculiarities of being, here.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/plants/feed/0img_0291slkundeThe Cold Groundhttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/the-cold-ground/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/the-cold-ground/#commentsFri, 25 Mar 2016 20:52:55 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=332Continue reading The Cold Ground]]>“We must be patient, but I cannot choose but weep to think they would lay him i’th’cold ground.”

Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

I got the call from my sister on a Friday afternoon. “Dad’s gone, Sharon.” This fact wasn’t a shock – my father had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver three years prior. He was housebound for the last year and essentially an invalid for the last several weeks. At Thanksgiving, my mother had called to tell me that she and the doctor had decided to place him on hospice care and to cease his regular peracenteses, medical procedures that drained the fluid pooling in his abdomen. They had made the decision only when it had become impossible for my increasingly frail mother to get him out of bed and into the car for the trip to the hospital, and when the trips had become excruciatingly frequent: upon diagnosis in 2012, he went in every three months, but by the end he had to go in almost every week. “I feel so guilty,” my mom, whose main goal on the day of the funeral was not to cry, whispered. “For pulling the plug.”

“Mom,” I said. “He did it to himself. He made himself sick, not you.” Some part of me was thinking, He finally got what he deserved. “You can’t take care of him anymore. It’s too much for you. It’s too much for the doctors.”

My sister described the morning of his death: his labored breathing, his unconsciousness, the way he had seemed soothed when she played the flute. “And then he stopped breathing.” They were waiting around for someone official to come and pronounce him dead. I was glad to be in the sunny piano room of my southern California bungalow and not in that snow-choked house.

What followed was not a backcountry hike, but it was a trek, and one that led to the frozen dirt of a prairie grave, my waxen-faced and crater-chested pére closed in a polished box placed into a clay vault set in a cold hole on a rise overlooking the Rock River. A one-thousand, nine-hundred-mile road to me alone the morning after his funeral, running in clothing too light for an Illinois December, but keen for the wind’s sharp absolution, its “sweet edge dividing me through heart and marrow” (Thoreau, of course) and dissipating the heat built up by the press of the hands and bodies of mourners offering condolences; the heat of a small house packed with the bags, breath, and voices of three generations of my father’s survivors. As I ran towards the cemetery, I tried to even out my inhalations and exhalations. I had to breathe hard and slow, and I could feel my lungs expelling the poison of the beers and too-salty pizza and the gummi bear martinis my cousins had pressed upon me at the kitchen table as evening wrapped the little house in its thickening cocoon. The dregs of the adrenalin of the three-days’ road trip, the West Texas blizzard we faced in a snow-virgin Prius. “To think they would lay him i’th’ cold ground,” I thought, crumbling a clod with an ungloved hand. Standing there as the low morning sun flashed on the river, heat poured from me, and I pondered being left in such a place, alone in some plot of unsheltered, windswept ground. For a second, I felt an equilibrium – not peace exactly, not acceptance, not joy in his or my someday “having gone to glory,” as one of the martini-mixing cousins had put it – just a thrilling, liquid equilibrium. I returned home with some of that windy sunshine caged in my chest.

The line from Hamlet kept popping into my head, despite the fact that the comparison of my father to Polonius is not apt. Where Polonius’s talk twined loops around his own feet, my father lived in snowy silence; where Ophelia’s old man lay traps to test her beau, my father seemed not to notice much of what I did or whom I did it with; where Polonius schemed for his family’s advancement, my father sat on the couch, listless behind the covers of a Western or spy thriller, having drunk what my siblings later told me was a nightly eight or nine beers (which explains his loyalty to a cheap beer like Schlitz). Both my sister and I remember having to escort friends and boyfriends past his form prone on the couch, accoutered in only a sagging pair of tighty-whities, maybe snoring, maybe ignoring us in favor of the latest Dean Koontz novel. I could never have sailed through the living room those nights without annealing my heart in a fire of rage.

My mother’s church was between ministers, and I was told that the pastor who would officiate – filling in from a nearby parish – didn’t know Dad that well. He asked all the survivors to write memories that he could use for the eulogy, and one afternoon shortly before the Husband, the boys and I began our drive east, I sat down and pounded out two single-spaced pages (for which I received no small amount of ribbing from my family). It was my first attempt to come to grips with Dad’s death, and I wrote it in what felt like a blaze of honesty, of trying to say what I really thought, despite the fact that one of Dad’s biggest legacies to me was a stubborn slowness to form and voice opinions. It felt like a small victory to articulate the strange mixture of admiration and resentment, recognition and incomprehension I felt. I attached it to an email and sent it to the minister, cc’ing the family. I thought maybe someone else had had some of these complex emotions about him, or might have had similarly complex emotions about someone else in his or (more likely?) her life.

I wasn’t surprised when, the night after the funeral, my brother chastised me for having pilloried the old man in my writing. For many of the mourners who had expressed their condolences to me that day, his standoffishness was a kind of strength, an endearing character trait: “He didn’t follow the arrows,” my sister-in-law said. And it’s true, he didn’t. In the spring of 2013, he’d had kidney failure, and the doctor told us it was the end, that it would take a miracle to save him. So I shelled out seven hundred bucks to get my butt to Sterling the next day; my brother flew out from Virginia; my sister hightailed it down from Wisconsin. The first day was somber, business-like: we discussed inheritances, executors, the car.

But by the second day, Dad rallied. He flirted with the nurses. We sat around his hospital bed eating candy from the vending machine and watching a basketball game. Even though we had a hospice representative talk us through that route, Dad just growled after she’d left, “I ain’t dead yet.” We were talking about music for the funeral, and when Gary found a recording of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” Dad chuckled. “Yeah, that one,” he said. “I like that one.” And so at the luncheon in the church basement following my father’s funeral, I found myself belting out the old jazz standard as my brother played the piano behind me: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention. I’ve done what I’ve had to do and seen it through without exemption.” He didn’t follow the arrows. Much of my life, I’d seen that quality as a downside, especially when one of the arrows of life apparent to me was a father’s duty to talk to his children and openly – hey, even lavishly – to express affection for them. Everyone I’d talked to that day seemed to see it differently, and I was starting to turn that idea over in my head – that my Dad’s refusal to do what he was supposed to do was a kind of strength.

But not before things got real between me and my siblings that night. I explained my anti-eulogy to my brother by saying that I hadn’t expected (correctly) the pastor to use everything I’d said, that I’d wanted to paint an honest portrait. That everything I felt about Dad was tangled up. When he countered that I should have taken it up with the old man when he was still alive I said that it would have been pointless. He wouldn’t have been able to give me what I wanted, which was some explanation, some words that traced out the nuances of his interior life. It was my own way of respecting him and protecting myself not to push him into some sort of deathbed confrontation, which would have only enraged or disappointed me.

But somehow this opened a kind of truth-telling. My sister said she was sorry for not having been there more, for not having looked back much in her own eagerness – having found a husband who satisfied her top criteria of being talkative (and many other criteria to boot) – to get married. Her words threw into relief an assumption I had always had, that my trials as a ten-year-old were insignificant and unmentionable beside my siblings’ adult-sized dramas – getting married, going to college, moving into the big city (Chicago). In fact, their precipitous exits were at least partly a symptom of the household’s vexed emotional flows. It was just unfortunate timing that the moves happened within the span of two years, the same years during which my adult brain – self-conscious, reflective, literary – took hold and during which my father’s career as a breadwinner suffered its most serious setbacks.

I can still remember hearing him tap-tap-tapping on the old-school typewriter behind a closed door. I later came across a cover letter he’d written for some job or another. It was unreal to see my father frame himself in writing, trying to shape the way a potential employer would see him. Still, that memory always fit the narrative I picked up from passing comments and personal observation to explain his life: that he had not quite finished high school but was intelligent and capable beyond his education level. That he had joined the Air Force when the call had come during the Korean War, and somehow or another had been awesome there, learning airplane mechanics, bravely fighting as a tail gunner and coming within inches of getting shot out of the sky once because the plane was in a radio-silent zone and he couldn’t betray positions by informing the pilot of the enemy planes drawing within range behind them. That he’d worked crazy hours at the slaughterhouse to pay off the mortgage within a few years of his marriage to my mom. That he’d gotten a great job at a small manufactory in Sterling only to storm out and quit when the boss proved himself to be a bigot and an idiot. This narrative started to fail at the point when my mom got part-time and then full-time work at the library to supplement his unemployment checks, when I had to bear the ignominy of his getting work as a school bus driver while I was in junior high. And then that ended, and he drove a mail route.

What my siblings told me that night changed the underpinnings of the story of my father’s life as I knew it. As far as the manufactory went he was overmatched, not possessed of the attention to detail the job required. As for the bus driving gig that I hoped none of my friends noticed, he’d lost that because of a DUI. He was pulling out from the Legion and backed into something. He got onto the mail route because my aunt needed a sub from time to time. My dad was a functional alcoholic. Functional enough for his life not to crash and burn completely. Functional enough that there were no interventions.

During that conversation, something shifted, and I’m still trying to figure out what it was. Like I said, just that afternoon, I’d gotten up in front of a room full of people and sung the following verse in his honor: “For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows, I took the blows and did it my way.” It had exasperated me that my father had chosen this song, when his insistence on doing it his way had meant, from my perspective, ignoring the needs of his wife and children. I sang it anyway and tried to love him for it, for having himself and for doing what he truly wanted, as the song would have it, something of his I could maybe learn to take as my legacy. The conversation that night made me imagine him unable to meet to his responsibilities instead of choosing to neglect them. For the first time, I saw glimmerings of a more nuanced person, one trying to keep going but getting in his own way: someone who liked to think of himself as independent and defiant but who in fact didn’t have enough of a toehold to rise above the addictions that had turned his liver into a useless log of bologna.

The preacher showed up at the church towards the end of the viewing (for the family), about ten minutes before the visitation (when everyone else offers the family condolences). He gathered us in the front pews and began a breathless speech about bodies. “He isn’t in there, you know,” he said, gesturing towards the coffin in the chancel. “That’s not him. If you take away my hand, I’m not gone. That’s not me. Take away my arm, my other arm, my leg. You can see that the body isn’t us, it’s just a vessel. The real him, the person you knew and love, is with Christ. What you know as your father, or your husband, or your grandfather is not his body and is therefore not gone.” I beg to differ. Without his body, my father is gone. Gone to glory, maybe, but gone nonetheless. True enough that the waxen heap in the next room – touched up just as the black and white photos of him in his bomber jacket had been hand-brightened with color – was not my father, but it was all that was left of him.

And then the bodies began pouring in, extended family, childhood friends, church members, drinking buddies from the Legion. I stood up next to my siblings and shook hands, let myself be gathered close to brittle skeletons, melting flesh, eyes blurred with cataracts, teeth stained, breath cellar-musty. I warmed myself by the slow fire of their blood’s combustion. After the burial, I lined up at the folding table replete with Midwestern casseroles and salads: bright orange tiles of cheesy potatoes, baskets heaping with fried chicken, petal-pink drifts of Jell-O mixed with marshmallow fluff and canned oranges: food I had forgotten people made. I warmed myself up, eating.

It had been cold at the cemetery, just as it would be the morning I ran there after he’d been buried. The sky was the peculiarly bleak white of Midwestern winters. My mother, siblings and I sat in folding chairs under the blue canopy. It was dark under there, and my sister-in-law began passing out tissues. Dad’s uniformed Amvet friends stood at attention on two sides of the casket. Dad had always been part of this color guard, keeping watch as another soldier was lowered into the ground. “Funeral today,” he’d tell mom, getting off the couch and suiting up, fixing the boat-shaped side cap at his signature jaunty angle. Seven men fired three times, a twenty-one-gun salute that echoed over the river, the sound wheeling skyward with the black birds that rose from the trees like ash from a fire. My nephew played taps, and two old-timers dignified by their stiff uniforms came forward to lift the flag draped over the coffin. They prepared it carefully, tucking the ends just so and pulling it taut. The one by Dad’s feet folded over a right triangle of cloth and took one step towards his partner, and like that closed the distance between them, handing off the bundle to the other man when he was done. “Well done, fellows,” my brother, himself a soldier, commended them under his breath.

This man stepped in front of my mother and leaned close to her. For whatever reason he whispered, an intimacy that surprised me: “The United States Government gives you this flag in remembrance of your husband’s loyal service to the nation.” Behind me, another of my nephews cried. I cried too, for the first time that day overmastered by an unambiguous emotion. Overmastered by the strange tragedy of a life lived in a human body, so fleet and so finite. The tragedy of a life aspiring to bravery, duty, independence, and yet so humble, multidirectional, divided against itself. My father, in his sagging underwear on the couch. My father, in his uniform, folding flags for friends felled by the flesh’s always untimely expiration.

And so I run in the cold, with a spendthrift morning sun gilding the underbellies of the low clouds. I run over the broken sidewalks and through the half-acre parks of my childhood, along the river’s wide bend. I run to the cemetery, on whose lichen-spotted monuments I used to sit and write angsty, pre-teen journal entries. I run past the scabrous oaks to that fresh-turned mound of dirt. My hands seek clods I can crumble, one day hard as metal ingots, the next a sticky clay. I pound the ground under which he is laid, in search of some balance between the cloistered heat of the house and the cold of that exposed knoll, in search of ways to spend this heat before it is nothing but drifting ash.

(photo, “Holographic Universe,” by Alex Markovich, whose work you can find here: http://photo-art.me/)

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/the-cold-ground/feed/1markovichslkundeOn Influencehttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/on-influence/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/on-influence/#respondMon, 01 Feb 2016 01:23:38 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=243]]>This project was partly inspired by seeing and then reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which reminded me that I’ve always wanted to do a long hike and made me see that now is the time to do it: I’m into my 40’s, and things I used to be able to take for granted (like my back) I suddenly can’t, while my kids, on the other hand, are becoming independent, and getting stronger and more skilled. This is the sweet spot, when we can all hike at the same pace and with the same intensity.

The conceit of Strayed’s book is that the hike allowed her physically to work through the grief and turmoil following her mother’s untimely death: the promotional material on her website says the hike “maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.” While I do think about my backcountry experiences as a way of confronting myself, I’m not hoping for closure, and I am trying to resist writing much of it into the account (though it’s a hard impulse for me to resist). I’m old enough to know that the breach doesn’t get closed in this life. I’m scratched up and bleeding and don’t expect not to be anytime soon. My aim is to live attentively within the painful contradictions of vocation, matrimony, and parenthood, not to resolve them.

No bridge? No problem!

And then I was fired up by this, a project that made the rounds of the liberal news media this summer. Like a lot of the cultural coverage by NPR, it’s insidiously androcentric. This particular project details ten or twelve literary road trips, an undertaking with which I have a lot of affinity, being a kind of road trip afficionado myself. Only just this summer I drove from LA to Boston and back again with the kids. (This is not even to mention the Russian-jeep-dirt-road odysseys of physical and emotional endurance I undertook in Mongolia). On the pedagogical side, I used to teach Kerouac’s On the Road to high schoolers using a map as a (only mildy effective, it turned out) learning aid: part of our “reading comprehension” at the beginning of each lesson was for one lucky student to win control of the sharpie and push pins and map out the route covered in the previous night’s reading. But check out those trips the Atlas Obscura memorializes: only one is a woman’s, and it’s Cheryl Strayed’s. I call bullshit on literary projects that lionize the male establishment and do squat to incorporate the voices of nondominant perspectives. If they don’t even try, they’re just rehearsing the grand argument that’s been handed down to us by a traditionally patriarchal literary establishment: that a white male perspective stands in for, trumps, and is generally richer and more interesting than the more “particular” perspectives of women and racial minorities.

I incorporate texts by authors writing from nondominant social positions in my scholarship and in my curricula, but why not write my own road trip? Why not pipe up? Why wait for the word when I can write it?

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/on-influence/feed/0IMG_0088.JPGslkundeCrossing a river in central MongoliaA Word On Formhttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/a-word-on-form/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/a-word-on-form/#respondFri, 15 Jan 2016 17:51:37 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=108Continue reading A Word On Form]]>This whole endeavor is called “Through-Hike,” but the “through” I have in mind is partially abstract. I’m doing the hike in fragments, provisionally and improvisationally. I’m not hiking the PCT or the JMT in a summer, or breaking it into chunks and hiking it over several summers. We might come to that eventually, and then again, we might not.

In any case, I have qualms about the kind of completeness or mastery that kind of project suggests. To hike the PCT is to hike from the southern to the norther border of the United States, but the borders of the country themselves are relatively recent historical (e.g., not natural) phenomena. At a talk at the Huntington I attended, a historian at Northwestern made the argument that we have been conditioned to privilege the image of the continental US despite the fact that the US actually holds a large number of island territories. The island territories tend to unsettle the central myths of continental manifest destiny: one, that a bicoastal North American territory was historically inevitable and two, that the West Coast naturally closed off the Euroamerican colonial reach. Because the island territories testify to the contingency and violence of westward expansion and to the ongoing trans-Pacific vectors of American colonialism, they tend not to show up in maps in high school history textbooks. My own impulse to hike a trail that stretches from border to border thus seems at some level to participate in the naturalization of extant borders.

To get even further into the dirt, there are a whole host of problems with the idea of the wilderness as we understand it, and the idea of the “PCT” or the “JMT” as a “thing” you can do to “connect” with the “backcountry” is rife with fictions, which I’ve just begun to gloss with those scare quotes. For starters, there never ever was a pristine, unsettled wilderness in North America untouched by humans. Nope, there were humans here already and they’d pretty much touched all of it, although not necessarily with agriculture or “permanent” structures (although what exactly is the durative threshold of permanence? Sure, wikiups don’t seem very permanent, but if you take a long view of things, the World Trade Center towers didn’t turn out to be very permanent either). Lincoln designated areas of the Yosemite Valley as protected towards the end of the Civil War, but in doing so he wasn’t simply setting aside the most special, unoccupied land. Much land had already been snapped up by private and commercial interests; what was left generally wasn’t very commercially viable. It was, however, most definitively occupied, by Native tribes who had been pushed out of other lands by the US government.

Yosemite (Yellowstone as well) initially kept their tribes as part of the scenery. Not surprisingly, this whole situation didn’t turn out to please anyone, as the Native ways of life didn’t graph well onto white tourism (they hunted the pretty animals, and the white people got all crazy in the head with the idea braves kidnapping their ladies, exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from bunch of Victorian honkies), so pretty soon the Natives got shoved out of the pretty public lands and wholly onto shitty ones. When the National Park Service was organized in the early nineteen hundreds, its mission intersected in a novel way with the longstanding American myth of the North American continent having been an unsettled and untouched wilderness before the Puritans got here.

The boys enjoy sunrise on North Dome of the Yosemite Valley. Half Dome is just over Son the Younger’s shoulder.

By the end of the nineteenth century, after the famous “closing of the frontier,” the country’s economic frontier (the places where the most growth and development were happening) shifted definitively from rural to urban areas. The boondoggling of Owens Valley water for use by the residents (really, for use by the developers of) Los Angeles is the perfect symptom of this shift: resources were transported great distances to support a burgeoning urban population despite the fact that there was an avidly interested local population who wanted to use that same water to support and develop local agriculture. The National Parks thus became part of an infrastructure of leisure for an urban middle class, an important safety valve that facilitated the concentration of population in dense urban environments. It tacitly propagated the myth that these areas were pristine, untouched, and unpeopled, which of course they weren’t. The National Park Service worked as a final, cruel way to take land away from indigenous peoples and give it to the white settlers for leisure, recreation, and idealization.

Overlooking the Yosemite Valley

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve spent a lot of times in National Parks. I’ve drunk deeply of that fiction of wilderness. And whatever I may have learned about the history and implications of the Parks, I still love hiking in them. But just as I want to be critically aware of the myths that subtend them, I want to retain some critical awareness of the myths that subtend the idea of through-hiking. The myth that a trail has an intrinsic integrity or trans-historical meaning. That a trek across a mountain, region, or country means something objective and empirical. That hiking long distances makes you a bad-ass or an adventurer or part of a club of insiders. As a consequence, I don’t plan to make this a big project which I have to complete in a particular way. This is meant to be time with myself, my family, my aging body, and I don’t care how much or how little we hike so much as I care that we commit to it and what it might entail. So we’ll hike bits and pieces – shards – and the shards might not add up to much when you line them up on a map. But I’m more interested in the kinds of territory Mary Austin describes in her introduction to The Land of Little Rain: “Guided by [familiarity with certain landmarks] you may reach my country and find or not find, according as it lieth in you, much that is set down here. And more. The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each.”

Boys in the woods: enjoying their claim to the legacy of Euroamerican colonialism. And so happy, alive!

Consulted

Cassuto, David. Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Southwest Desert. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York, Columbia University Press, 2002.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/a-word-on-form/feed/0IMG_1716slkundeIMG_1651IMG_1641IMG_1616Baden-Powell: Night Hike, 2https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/baden-powell-night-hike-2/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/baden-powell-night-hike-2/#respondFri, 04 Dec 2015 18:33:09 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=126]]>(As a quick recap, last time I posted about undertaking a night hike to the top of Mt. Islip, over and above Son the Younger’s particular resistance to it.)

At first, we were completely confident. We passed the uppermost camp areas in Little Jimmy and a tall wooden contraption meant for monitoring snowpack. We curved around the flank of the mountain, enjoying the scent of the tiny white blossoms that bordered the trail. When we reached the southern face of the mountain, the pines gave way to snaggled cypresses, and the wind out of the LA basin began to pick up. We passed an older couple on their way down: they’d taken their supper up and eaten overlooking the dreamy, teeming valley. Half a mile more, they said.

Son the Younger dug in, and by digging in I mean crying ceaselessly. We hiked on, even though The Husband and I discussed turning back over the kids’ heads. But no, we were almost there: the peak was ghosting into view, along with the ramshackle, disused building the older couple had said graced the top. We had to make it now. We slowed down as the mountain fell away at our left more steeply and more rockily. In the trainlight beams of our headlamps, it was hard to see exactly what would happen if someone went cockeyed off the side of the trail.

And here things get complicated: I was taking the kids hiking as part of a programmatic practice of meditative awareness of our embodiment and emplacement, but my doing so was making Son the Younger miserable, in part because of fears he himself tries to control by sticking to the programs given to him. It was a war of the programs. And when I can open up my brain wide enough to be aware of it, I know I need to be careful about how I wield program-sticking in my parenting. Son the Younger has already got a little game going around it: if I need to correct him – show him how to play a phrase on the piano, tell him to stop playing soccer with a stuffed bear in the house – his response is to moan, “I’m a bad boy! I’m a bad boy!” and smack himself on the forehead. This happens so frequently that I have my own patterned and default response to it, which is to feel mild exasperation and tell him sternly, “No you are not a bad boy. Please stop saying that,” or even better, “The only time you’re a bad boy is when you say you’re a bad boy.” My non-default mind knows that this kind of mutually and mildly selfish and manipulative interaction is laying the grounds for problems as he turns into a teenager. I don’t quite know how to get out of this pattern with the little guy, but I know I need to stop reinforcing the dominance of the program for him.

But in any case there it was! A wrecked cabin filled with rubble, spray-painted swearwords, and waste. The sky was mostly dark, with a pool of mellow amber on the western horizon. Los Angeles’s sickly orange lights shimmered at our feet, brimming the ocean-wide valley. Once The Husband and I deemed that we had sat long enough to appreciate the impressive view, we headed back down.

Son the Younger didn’t stop crying the whole way down, although he did let up a bit when we curved around the side of the mountain and out of the wind. He finally stopped when we passed the snowpack monitor near the camp, both Medieval and futuristic in the bleachy light of our headlamps.

This anecdote brings up something explored in an earlier post, which is what we want for our children, or as I phrased it before, selfish parenting. I don’t know what I wanted Son the Younger to get from that experience. I suppose I reasoned to myself that I was teaching him courage or stamina or sharing with him my love of being in the mountains and out of the modern life’s unremitting squalor, its eerie screens and its internal combustion engines and its unending poison stream of unfulfilling stimulations. But I also wanted to do the hike, to tack 2.2 more miles onto a trip significantly less butch than the one I had originally planned. I dragged him up and down a windy rock pile in the dark against his will and past his rightful bedtime. I have no real excuse. If it was a war of the programs, then my program won. This time.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/baden-powell-night-hike-2/feed/0IMG_6280slkundeBaden-Powell: Night-Hike, 1https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/baden-powell-night-hike-1/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/baden-powell-night-hike-1/#commentsFri, 20 Nov 2015 16:51:50 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=84]]>Backcountry hiking plays into the satisfaction I gain from completing things on schedule. I plan the meals, I plan the mileage, I plan the timing, and I love it when we hike into a campsite about when I thought we would.

One reliable spring, endearingly called Little Jimmy, has survived the drought and lies within ten miles of Baden-Powell, the second-highest peak in the San Gabriels, an impressive 9406 feet. We planned to pick the kids up from school on Friday, drive up past La Canada into the San Gabriels, hit the trail by approximately 16:30 and do a short hike in to the Little Jimmy campsite. We’d top off the water bottles the next morning, bag Baden-Powell, and dry-camp somewhere between BP and Jimmy. We’d have just enough water to get us to midmorning or lunch the third day, by which time we were pretty certain we could make it back to the spring. I had an ambitious program to which I could make us all masterfully stick.

Son the Elder looks out over the southern face of the San Gabriels on the way to Baden-Powell.

I realize that my compulsion to stick with the program is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I have the ability to be ruthlessly efficient and goal-oriented. On the other hand, it has the potential to tip out of control and be self-defeating, especially when it comes to goals that are qualitative and nuanced. Meditating provides an apt example, if difficult to describe. My meditation practice asks you to meditate two hours a day, once in the morning and once at night. At ten-day-courses, the necessity and benefits of this much meditation are explained forcefully. You’re trying to change the habits of your mind at the level of sensation. The only chance you have to make any headway is to put in time during which you’re at least observing honestly what your mind is actually doing.

The demands of this meditation practice is sort of a disaster with my compulsion to stick with programs, because I want to sit the two hours, but it gets hard to tell if I’m doing it because it’s the program or because I’m genuinely, fervently motivated to change my mind’s habits. And that uncertainty causes fallout in my mind about not being a good enough meditator, about not doing it right, which in turn creates all sorts of reactions of craving and aversion. I crave the feeling of completion, of having stuck with the program, of having made progress even when it’s clear that sticking to the program has infuriatingly interfered with the desired results of having stuck to the program. Although even that happens in shades and degrees – sometimes I’m kind of sticking to the program and kind of doing the meditation (or whatever else it might be) for itself. And this in-betweenness, this “kind of” in relation to my programs, when the programs and the doing-the-thing-for-itself aren’t quite in sync, make me feel, for lack of a better word, yucky. Like sticky junk is circulating through my inner spaces and clinging to the walls of whatever tubes my awareness and words flow through.

I get a little relief from this from Son the Younger. I used to think that this tension between sticking to the program and being in sync with my higher goals and the moment in a natural, effortless way was a character failing of mine. Now I think it’s actually set from birth in our personality makeups, wherever that might come from, because Son the Younger distinctly has this issue whereas Son the Elder doesn’t (implying that simply being raised by me doesn’t condemn you to it). Seeing the poor little guy turn all blotch-faced and weepy because he gets a tardy slip makes me feel compassion for him and me. I understand that he’s sad not because he’s ruined his attendance record but because he has failed to do what is expected of him. He has not stuck with the program. He can’t help having these strong feelings and compulsions, which suggests that I can’t either.

Part of the program for me on that hike became maximizing our mileage, because this hike was a stand-in for a longer and more ambitious hike in the Sierras we’d had to abort due to the Rough Fire. Both The Husband and I were keen to do a side-hike to the peak of Mt. Islip after setting up camp in Little Jimmy. By the time we started the hike, the sun was sinking and the sky smudging up with shadows and tropical colors.

This didn’t bother The Husband or me; we’d done our fair share of night hiking. In fact, in a situation that could be construed as extravagantly romantic or embarrassingly juvenile, we’d spent our honeymoon as counsellors at the Scout ranch, Philmont, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico (The Husband had been an Eagle Scout). So absolutely insufferable were the Scouts (this was before the organization’s grudging acceptance of homosexuality), that they didn’t want a married couple serving at the same trail camp. The gig was already humiliatingly puerile: trail camps were themed stopovers for troops doing ten day hikes, and mine was a cowboy-slash-dude camp with a musical campfire routine. We were under the authority of a Camp Director from Arkansas who hung a confederate flag in his bunk and told me I sang like Julie Andrews (meant as a crushing insult). While I worked in this paradise, my husband worked upcountry about four miles, at a resupply station called Ute Gulch. Sometimes he’d hike over for dinner and hike back in the dark. Sometimes I hiked there. More than once, we’d met halfway at a place called Window Rock for breakfast. I’d bring a thermos of cowboy coffee, made every morning in a huge blue-speckled stovetop coffeepot by boiling a tied-off knee-high pantyhose (pantyhoe?) stuffed with coffee grounds in a gallon of creek water. We’d watch the sun drain the purple-shadowed ravines and turn the mountains a crystalline blue and then troop off, he going north and I going south, to our truly pointless contractual obligations.

Hiking at night always made me a little nervous, but because of Philmont I learned to like it. The Husband pointed out to me a phenomenon he called a “Floridian,” a patch of inexplicably warm air. Deprived of visual input, the body becomes more aware of slight changes in temperature, and the Floridian suddenly jolts you into an awareness of how much your skin is feeling. I grew to know the curves in the trail, the patches of moon-white mushrooms. I could sense about when I should be passing over the grassy knoll after which the supply shack would come into view, a weather-greyed plywood box at the base of the Ute Mesa.

Because of this experience, I wasn’t too worried about the pack-free, 2.2 mile round trip to the top of Mt. Islip, a completely doable 700 foot elevation gain. But Son the Younger was just not into it. My guess is he was a little scared and a little tired, and frankly hiking after dark just didn’t fit into his program of what humans were supposed to do, especially given that I had upon our most recent hike which had also bled into the dusk hours expressed great concern about mountain lions, who hunt at twilight and target short people. But we hiked on. And next time you can see how my program panned out against Son the Younger’s.

]]>https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/baden-powell-night-hike-1/feed/3IMG_6280slkundeIMG_6255Mission Statement 2: A Walk on the Spiritual Sidehttps://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/mission-statement-2-a-walk-on-the-spiritual-side/
https://throughhike.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/mission-statement-2-a-walk-on-the-spiritual-side/#commentsThu, 05 Nov 2015 20:10:47 +0000http://throughhike.wordpress.com/?p=81Continue reading Mission Statement 2: A Walk on the Spiritual Side]]>I practice a kind of meditation called “Vipassana,” which translates as “awareness.” It is practiced as moment-to-moment engagement with the sensations on and in the body.

The idea goes like this: a stimulus comes in contact with one of the sense doors, and a sensation, or vedana, arises. Our habituated perceptive apparatuses instantaneously evaluate that sense perception on the basis of previous experiences, acculturated assumptions, etc. This perception is called sanya. Next comes the crucial link, the sankara. The sankara is craving or aversion in response to our perception of the sensation. In the most basic terms, something that we’ve coded as good (like the taste of our favorite ice cream or the kiss of a lover), we want more of. We want the sensation to last. Something we’ve coded as bad (embarrassment, physical pain), we develop aversion to: we want it to end, we want to get away from it, we want to master or change it.

These sankaras are bouncing around all the time beneath the threshold of awareness, and they form the topography of the fourth link in this chain reaction the vinyana, or consciousness. This part of us is (or seems to be) our selves, our drives and volitions. Buddha figured out that the only link in this chain (vedena/sensation, sanya/perception, sankara/reaction, vinyana/consciousness) over which we have any control is actually the sankara, and we paradoxically get that control through close but non-interventionary observation of it. In other words, we learn to lower the threshold of our awareness so that those sankaras register in our conscious minds, where we can at least try not to act upon them (under normal conditions, we act upon these reactions, feeding them with thought, vocalization, or physical action). We can become aware of our cravings and aversions and learn to observe them instead of building mental or physical dramas with them. In fact, through observation, our vinyana learns to countenance the fact that these cravings and aversions are impermanent. They always pass away. They will pass away more quickly if we don’t make them the basis of mental, vocal, or physical actions.

major source of attachment-suffering for me: wishing the boys had never stopped being babies

The reason we would want to weaken the hold of craving and aversion in the first place is that all craving and aversion are the sources of suffering. Aversion seems pretty obvious, but how can the satisfaction of craving be the source of suffering? The answer is that impermanence we just went over. Whether or not we want to accept it and whether or not we are able to observe it on a moment-to-moment basis, everything changes, everything is changing constantly. Therefore, when we have and are holding something we really want and want to last, that thing inevitably changes. The piece of cake ends. The baby grows up. The son leaves home. The fortune needs to be preserved and extended through careful management. The house needs to be maintained. The property becomes a source of conflict and division between family members. The career demands more time, more accomplishment. The monsters need to be fed, and we can feed them only with our time/attention/energy. We hold on to versions of our identities that we want other people to see and crave, and it takes a lot of energy to maintain the public faces of those identities. We get locked into those patterns of being and lose our abilities to respond to reality as it is, preferring instead to struggle with reality to get it to conform to what we had planned for the day. We lose the ability to respond to possible new selves that are emerging in the moment.

Which brings me back to material, and getting into the dirt, and hiking through it. Vipassana as I’ve begun to practice it in the last year or so involves trying to engage with reality as it is evolving around me in real time, as my body is enmeshed in its immediate physical circumstances. I try to be aware of what’s really happening – not what I’d like to happen, not what I’ve planned on happening – and think about what it’s asking of me, how I’m in relation with it in the moment. That means putting some of my plans and ideas on hold sometimes (when I can do it, which isn’t as often as I’d like). I’ve seen people who do this well, who engage deeply in every interaction, who are open to the reality of the moment and not the glittering mechanisms of their aspirations, and it is truly a joy and inspiration to be around them. They remind me of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement Speech, “This is Water,” in which he argues that our default minds (the ones in which the sankaras are bouncing around unchecked, like a hall of mirrors) will have us worshiping what it seems like everyone around us worships. Fame. Money. Power. Beauty. Desirability. Status. These gods, Wallace says, will “eat you alive,” precisely because things change. Bodies grow old, money gets spent, pride in an accomplishment quickly fades and needs to be shored up by yet more accomplishment. What he offers in their place is awareness, the choice of what to concentrate on, which he suggests a liberal arts education seeks to cultivate in its students. I think DFW is talking about something like Vipassana: the awareness of the sensations, the longings, the perceptions that are always directing our consciousness and actions just below the surface. So let’s peel back that surface, let’s get into the material of our bodies and its instructive, practical wisdom.

And in case you’re interested in taking a course in Vipassana meditation; it’s not for the faint of heart, but you’ll be a different person on Day 11!